President Biden drew a parallel between a Soviet-era famine and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine on Saturday.

“We mark the solemn anniversary of the Holodomor as the brave people of Ukraine continue to defend their freedom and Ukraine’s sovereignty against Russia’s brutal war of aggression. Ninety years ago, the inhumane policies of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet regime created the ‘death by hunger,’ Biden said in a Saturday statement.

“Millions of Ukrainians—men, women, and children—suffered and starved to death between 1932-1933 because of a manmade famine,” Biden continued. “Stalin and his regime systematically seized Ukraine’s grain and farms and transferred Ukrainian grain to other parts of the USSR as a tactic to repress Ukraine’s national identity.”

The Holodomor is described as “the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies” by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC), which is a project of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta.

“In 1932, the Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state,” HREC says on its website. “When the villages were not able to meet the quotas, authorities intensified the requisition campaign, confiscating even the seed set aside for planting and levying fines in meat and potatoes for failure to fulfill the quotas.”